By CHRISTOPHER GRAY

Published: March 24, 1996

FEW people know one of New York's most spectacular interiors, just as sumptuous as the New York Public Library and just as dazzling as the Chrysler Building. It's the 1899 Gould Memorial Library, at New York University's old uptown campus, on 180th Street between Sedgwick and University Avenues -- now Bronx Community College. The grand, domed reading room, designed by Stanford White, has long been idle, but now Bronx Community College is making progress in returning it to use.

Henry MacCracken, who became Chancellor of N.Y.U. in 1891, was convinced that the private college on Washington Square needed a campus far north of its crowded Greenwich Village site. With White, a partner in the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, he developed a plan for a site on a high ridge of Bronx land overlooking the Harlem River, with dramatic, distant views to the Palisades.

The White/MacCracken plan ringed a large plateau with a sports field, dormitories and, on the western edge, academic buildings flanking a central structure for university administrators, an auditorium and a library.

The donor of the new central building was Helen Miller Gould, who had graduated from N.Y.U. Law School in April 1895 in a class of 48 women in a law program separate from that for male students. Her father, Jay Gould, was a ruthless railroad speculator who had amassed millions.

Anyone who knows Charles McKim's contemporary Low Library at Columbia will be astonished at the comparison with the Gould Memorial Library, designed by McKim's partner. Although both are domed structures of very similar purpose, McKim's limestone Low Library is passive, reserved, distant.

By comparison, White's library is full of brilliant flashes of excitement, like lightning bolts in a grand thunderstorm. On the outside, of straw-colored brick and limestone, White played with a complex series of forms that bob and weave around the dome, itself emphasized by a high drum. A rich copper cornice, like deeply worked Art Nouveau silver, follows the roofline around the building. Behind, the sweeping colonnade of the Hall of Fame and its busts of famous Americans -- another Helen Gould benefaction -- centers this temple of learning and frames the crest of the Palisades, to the west.

Inside, a narrow, Renaissance-style flight of stairs under a high barrel vault rises until you spill into the huge, round reading room, with a domed ceiling perhaps 80 feet high. This room is a symphony of mosaics, green Irish marble, Tiffany glass, statuary and gilt decoration.

The surrounding ring of book stacks is emblazoned with the names of the most important creators of our written knowledge. A hundred or more of those names stare back at you: Cervantes, Confucius, Faraday, Mohamed, Isaiah, on and on. The ceiling is a mesmerizing swirl of interlocking coffers, leading to what once was a central circle of stained glass. In the center of the room, a glass block floor originally let light down into the auditorium below, a striking but less ambitious room.

IN 1969 an arsonist burned out the auditorium, and the fire and smoke broke through the glass floor and rushed up through the reading room, destroying the stained glass in the dome by a chimney effect. The next year New York University rebuilt the auditorium in a striking but brutal modern style, perhaps designed by the campus architect of the time, Marcel Breuer.

New York University left its uptown campus in 1973, and for years the Gould Library has lain largely fallow at what is now Bronx Community College. Although the auditorium is used for assemblies, the reading room has been opened only for special occasions. For a recent lunch it was filled with metal folding chairs, food carts and movable aluminum coat racks.

The surrounding stacks are empty of books, littered with dust and debris, and the giant marble columns are stained from water damage. The room has the tragic beauty of a great encyclopedia in gilt Morocco leather bindings just tossed in a corner. The college has not abused it, but it cries out for real use.

Now the college, part of the City University of New York, has hired the William A. Hall Partnership to design a roof renovation, and has chosen Platt Byard Dovell to design a restoration of the basement auditorium -- in part to recapture the larger seating of the original design.

"The credit is all to Fernando Ferrer," the Bronx Borough President, says the architect Paul Byard. The office of Mr. Ferrer, a former landmarks commissioner who attended the N.Y.U. uptown campus, is providing about one-third of the $1.4 million budget. The rest is coming from the City Council.

That will leave the reading room. The four-level warren of stacks that surrounds the room is so inefficient in modern terms that the building will never be used as a real library again. But according to the college's dean of administration, Donald Cancierre, Bronx Community College does have a draft master plan to build a new library behind the old one, and restore the reading room as a central introductory area. That plan, though, is years away.

In the meantime this haunting but inspiring space is open on an informal basis to the public. Information is available through the Hall of Fame office -- (718) 289-5161.

Photos: Parts of the Gould Memorial Library will be restored. Butrestoration of the domed reading room as part of a new library is still years away. (Photographs by George Gutierrez for The New York Times)